It's a plot of the magnitude and phase of the gain of a device or system vs. frequency.

It's commonly used to design feedback loops, e.g. the controller for a switching power supply circuit. If you plot the loop gain, i.e. the total gain of all the circuits in the control loop, then you can determine the stability of the loop by metrics such as the phase margin, which is the phase at the frequency where the magnitude of the gain is unity.

If you look at the data sheet for a DC-DC converter chip, they will often have a discussion about this kind of stuff, and a Bode plot is likely to be there.

Gus has an empire that spans several states, which must take hundreds of street dealers like that. I can't see Gus personally dealing with people at that level. Surely he wouldn't want them to even know his name.

I think people misunderstand what planned obsolescence is. It's a devious plot to make things fail in a designated time, so that you'll be forced to buy a new thing. It's a questionable practice, because customers are likely to by a new thing from a different source.

What actually happens a lot is that products are just shoddy, and they fail because the cheap parts break or wear out.

A sobering fact is that you generally have to choose between low cost and good quality. I design circuits as a professional, and we pay a guy $70/hour to do the layout. He does a great job, and that's what it costs.

Unless you have a sound business plan that is going to make good money from this product, you probably want to figure out how to do it yourself.

A point many people seem to miss is that patent infringement doesn't depend on the knowledge of the infringer or the characteristics of the inventor.

If Apple independently came up with an idea after it was patented by somebody else, that's an infringement. It doesn't matter whether the inventor dropped out of high school, whether he grew up on a farm, or whether he builds stuff that uses his invention.

If Apple wants to overturn this, they will have to show that they're not actually using his idea.

Good question. Tradition, I guess, and the fact that CAT5 cable is really cheap.

The problem with doing clever tricks like that is you end up with non-standard hardware, and then the next guy that comes along has no clue how it's wired. People expect computer stuff to just work when they plug it in.

Many CPUs have USB interfaces, but developing the code is a bit of a project.

The FTDI chip will plug into a PC and show up as a serial port, and it's really easy to write CPU code to send and receive characters. If you just want a simple interface, that's the easiest way to get it going.

Microprocessor. An off-the-shelf part with custom code. You can create a very complex machine at low cost, but the timing is slow.

Programmable logic, PLD or FPGA. Fairly fast, can do parallel operations, more effort than a CPU to get a given function implemented. You can put a CPU core into the FPGA, but it cost more than an off-the-shelf CPU.

Custom IC. Extremely versatile, includes all the benefits of 1 and 2, low cost in high volume, but very high development cost.

Discrete logic chips. This was common decades ago, but now is costly and big, and the design effort is high.

Well, if you rebuild homes and businesses in the same place after they are wiped out by a storm, then it's safe to say they will be wiped out again. A smarter idea would be to build the new structures somewhere else.

While it's a burden to abandon ocean-front property, it's not the end of the world, especially if it happens over a period of 100 years. Everybody who lives in an ocean front house will be dead before it gets swallowed by the sea. Surely there must be worse things about global warming, or this would hardly be a crisis.